English is the most unpure language and suprisingly the most popular language because of its ease.

In what way can the term ease be used to describe anything about English? Let us see:

in grammer? Well there are probably several dozen grammer nazis reading this post that can atest that there is nothing easy about the English grammer. In fact several of the grammer nazis will correct what the last grammer nazi did wrong.

in spelling? Certainly English is easy to spell so long as you remember that there are no rules except that there are exceptions to every rule.

maybe it is intuitive? Certainly, after all you have minimum, maximum, and then... middlemum (my 3 year old came up with that one when trying to explain the average of something to us).

in speech? Based on the number of lawyers we have around and the lengths of even the smallest legal document needed to clearly expain a common sense topic I see no way of descibing English speech as easy (not to use or understand).

I could go on with my argument on how badly English is screwed up and aught to be scrapped completely but many others have proven my point through some creative writing:

We polish the Polish furniture. He could lead if he would get the lead out. A farm can produce produce. The dump was so full it had to refuse refuse. The soldier decided to desert in the desert. The present is a good time to present the present. At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum. The dove dove into the bushes. I did not object to the object. The insurance for the invalid was invalid. The bandage was wound around the wound. There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row. They were too close to the door to close it. The buck does funny things when the does are present. They sent a sewer down to stitch the tear in the sewer line. To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow. The wind was too strong to wind the sail. After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number. I shed a tear when I saw the tear in my clothes. I had to subject the subject to a series of tests. How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend? I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.

The English LessonWe'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes,But the plural of ox is oxen, not oxes.Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,But the plural of house is houses, not hice.If the plural of man is always called men,Why shouldn't the plural of pan be pen?The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,But I give a boot... would a pair be beet?If one is a tooth, and a whole set is teeth,Why shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth?If the singular is this, and the plural is these,Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be kese?Then one may be that, and three be those,Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,But though we say mother, we never say methren.The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim.So our English, I think you will agree,Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

I take it you already knowof tough, and bough and cough and dough?Others may stumble, but not youon hiccough, through, slough and though.Well done! And now you wish, perhapsTo learn of less familiar traps?Beware of heard, a dreadful wordThat looks like beard and sounds like bird.And dead; it's said like bed, not bead!For goodness sake, don't call it deed!Watch out for meat and great and threat,(They rhyme with suite and straight an

Everybody can read and understand English, even PHBs. So, if we had a reliable C -> English translator, then even PHBs would be able to understand what a given function does (I doubt they'd be able to understand a complete system, since that involves holding together the interaction lots of functions.)

Rational (of ROSE fame) invented a language called 'Controlled English'. This is English with a formal lexicon and grammar, absolutely awful to write, but

Ease in getting started. You can say most anything with a knowledge of few hundred words, and remarkably few rules. That you can say the same thing in a more complicated way with a knowledge of a few tens of thousands of words, and many more rules is largely irrelevant.

in grammer? Well there are probably several dozen grammer nazis reading this post that can atest that there is nothing easy about the English grammer. In fact several of the grammer nazis will correct what the last grammer nazi did wrong.

Newsflash! People are not as smart as they think they are! English has an interesting position in the language world -- there are those that believe that there is only one way to speak a language correctly, and they know this correct way; yet there is no body governing th

Having a wife who's mother tongue is Russian, I can assure you that English is very easy for foreigners to pick up. With a relatively small vocabulary and EXTREMELY forgiving syntax (not to mention cross-polination of words), most foreingers have no difficulties in communicating well enough to be understood.

Unfortunately, English falls flat in the *mastery* area. Most other languages are easier to master, because they tend to use one word for one concept. The downside to this is that other languages tend to demand mastery, while English allows the speaker to present the concept in as simplistic terms as possible and still be understood.

I wonder if some of the "dialects" of English such as those found in various Regions of the United States contribute to the mastery problem?

Not really. The biggest hurdle in mastering English is laziness. Most people don't want to learn "big words" such as "pyrotechnic", "facetious", "colloquial", or "penultimate" when simpler phrases such as "explosive devices", "bad joke", "local slang", and "second to ultimate" can be used just as well. Unfortunately, the former words convey quite a bit more richness in their definitions than the later phrases do. This results in the phrase "you know what I mean?" being constantly uttered.

Even worse is when people use phrases such as "He went to the store" instead of "He walked to the store", "He drove to the store", or "He jogged to the store". The former is perfectly acceptable, but fails to communicate many of the details inherent in the described excursion.

The second biggest barrier is proper grammar. Again, it take quite a bit of practice to state, "My apologies, I was unavoidably detained." instead of "Sorry I'm late." The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication.

Remember, only you can prevent yourself from saying, "And I was like, ugh, and she was like duh, and he was like whatever, then I went like that, and then you know...";-)

Okay, I've got about four interesting (IMHO) things to say regarding points you made. I've numbered em, so if you get bored with one you can skip to the others.:) If you don't want to read it all, I'll just tell you the thesis: languages and language change are extraordinarily complicated, and reducing the latter to laziness is misleading (if not plain wrong).

1. The reality of phonological change, and linguistic change in general

Not really. The biggest hurdle in mastering English is laziness.

This is a very common sentiment among educated people, cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. In basically every culture around the world, there is a group of people, usually middle-aged, that believes that people spoke their language "correctly" about a generation or two ago.

The fact is that languages change constantly, and lots of these changes can be pretty well understood as natural processes. For instance, if you're from the US, you probably pronounce the word butter with a d-like sound in normal speech (linguists call the sound a "voiced alveolar tap"). So it sounds just like "budder". When people started using that pronunciation, their elders probably thought them "lazy" as well.
I can almost hear them saying, "Pronounce your t's properly!"

But think about it. In order to pronounce the word with a proper tt in the middle, you'd have to turn your voice on to say the b and the u, then turn it off to say tt, and then turn it back on to say er. It's much easier to just leave your voice on! And that's what people started doing. If you say the word with a hard t sound in America today, people will probably consider it strange.

This does not imply that the speakers are/were lazy. In fact, this is a ridiculously common kind of phonological change. The same thing happened, for instance, when Latin amicus (pronounced [amikus]) changed to Modern Spanish amigo. That [k] sound turned to a [g] because it was between two vowels.

2. Registers

The second biggest barrier is proper grammar. Again, it take quite a bit of practice to state, "My apologies, I was unavoidably detained." instead of "Sorry I'm late." The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication.

People use different means of encoding meanings depending upon the register. That is, you speak differently depending on the social context. If you're late for a job interview, you probably wouldn't say my bad, the fuckin freeway's a mess by way of apology. Similarly, if you're late arriving to a keg party, you probably wouldn't say my apologies, I was unavoidably detained, unless you mean to be mildly humorous. (One probably wouldn't say that last sentence to one's spouse, either. The sentence is pretty strongly restricted to formal contexts.)

3. The reality of syntactic change

Regarding grammar, that's always in flux too. Consider the sentence, I'm going to buy a car next week. This is a future tense construction in Modern English, even though it doesn't much look like one to an educated reader. The word going in this kind of sentence no longer implies any kind of movement, as evidenced by the sentence, I'm going to sit here in my chair for three hours. (This construction, by the way, is being heavily phonologically reduced these days, to I'm gonna do or even I'munna do. This is something that happens very frequently to grammatical markers.)

What is going on here? Well, English speakers used to only use the verb go to mean movement. They then began using it for movement associated with proximal futures (with modal and aspectual meaning tied in), as in

Hal: Hang on a second, Bob -- where are you going?Bob: I'm going to buy some fruit.

Not before we get general-purpose artificial intelligence. As it stands, just about every language in use today is context free, so a single statement can have only one meaning. English, on the other hand, can have statements whose meaning cannot be determined in isolation.

"Time flies like an arrow."

"Fruit flies like a banana."

Both sentences can be parsed in either of two ways: Time(noun) flies(verb) like an arrow, or Time(adjective) flies(noun) like an arrow. Don't ask me what a time fly is. I

Both sentences can be parsed in either of two ways: Time(noun) flies(verb) like an arrow, or Time(adjective) flies(noun) like an arrow. Don't ask me what a time fly is. It might be some sort of time-travelling insect that's out to destroy us all.

There's a third interpretation: Time (verb) flies (noun) like (in the manner of) an arrow. So you should get your stopwatch out, and time the flies; but do it the way an arrow would.

Both sentences can be parsed in either of two ways: Time(noun) flies(verb) like an arrow, or Time(adjective) flies(noun) like an arrow. Don't ask me what a time fly is. It might be some sort of time-travelling insect that's out to destroy us all. I don't want to think about it. The point is, a computer cannot consistently eliminate such possibilities, and therefore has a difficult time figuring out what you're talking about.

A computer would have no more difficulty than we would. Most people upon first he

Well, I wouldn't call anything that includes getting your government to ban words a "good job".French government forbidding their employees to say "e-mail" just because it's a word that came from English is nothing but pure nazism.

Currently, it's still one single language with many dialects, but it might soon reach a point where these dialects will be recognized as different languages of their own right, with different grammars.

It may have, if we were still hundreds of years ago. I think with the internet and ease of international travel, the various dialects may actually merge more. I already hear certain "britishisms" (look ma, I created a new word!) being used in the US (across the pond, 'bloody', etc.). IMHO the more the wo

Even Slashdot has its own "Slashspeak" (Sorry, couldn't resist the quotations marks, as per some of the previous threads). Some has taken me a while to figure out. Some I still haven't figured out. There should be a FAQ page with some of the frequently used Slashspeak, IMHO.;)

Here some of the few I've managed to figure out on my own.

IANAL = I am not a lawyer (with lawyer sometimes replaced with astronomer, physicist, etc)
WRT = with regard to
AFAIK = as far as I know
RTFA = read the f***ing article; also shortened to TFA or just FA - see parent post for FTFA, another variation - substitutes "from" for "read"
WTF= what the f*** usually followed by lots of ?'s and !'s
GP = grandparent, or grandparent post, the parent before the previous (parent) post

The points of things like "CYA" and 'l8r' is that they sound the same as "See ya" and 'later', but they're easier to type (arguably l8r is not easier to type, however). There's no benefit to saying 'cya' versus 'see ya' because it comes out, verbally, the same.

The problem is that this sort of thing alters the way we communicate in a written manner. The English language, especially when it's being written, is already muddled enough without inv

There's no benefit to saying 'cya' versus 'see ya' because it comes out, verbally, the same.

so what? writing things without capital letters signifies the same utterance; why did you use capital letters? and that gratitous apostrophe?

The English language, especially when it's being written, is already muddled enough without inviting new deficincies just because a bunch of fourteen year old kids are too lazy to type or waste too much time IM'ing each other on cell phones.

There's also a difference between formal language and informal language, and a difference between monologue and discourse. Chances are that when you see a friend on the street, you don't launch into a speech. Rather, you exchange a series of mostly monosyllables and sentence fragments. If, however, you begin telling a story or explaining something, you'll use mostly complete sentences and organize them in a logical structure. If you are called upon to do some public speaking, you will probably additionally enunciate more and add extra information to cover for the fact that the audience cannot interrupt you with questions.

The "netspeak" discussed in the article is the written counterpart to conversational English. It is not derived from formal writing; it is derived from informal spoken discourse, adapted to typed text.

It is obviously inappropriate for formal writing, and students have to be taught to write well, but there's no reason that they can't chat online informally and write papers formally. No parents avoid chatting around the breakfast table for fear that they will somehow damage their ability to give speeches. Cicero didn't deliver a prepared speech when he wanted to know how his friends were feeling, and there's no reason people chatting online should write essays to each other.

(Incidentally, the plural of "medium" is "media", unless your offspring are chatting with the dead)

The traditional pronunciation (based on derivation and history) is simply ignored.

When has the traditional pronounciation been based on derivation and history? It's based on how things are actually pronounced. Frequently, when it's supposedly based on derivation and history, it's wrong: the t in valet was pronounced in the era of French that word was borrowed from, and it was pronounced for hundreds of years in English, until someone came along with "derivation and history".

Don't worry, Netspeak is temporary. Within a few years I expect the net will be awash with video. Technologically we're almost there, we just need a little bit more penetration of broadband and a killer app to get the ball rolling. Once this happens, most of the casual textual material will vanish. I don't know what the net will look like or how it will operate. It will probably be similar to the change that happened when the web replaced gopher. The web is not simply gopher with images, it is an entirely different beast that is used in different ways. Likewise, the addition of video will be one of those proverbial "paradigm shifts".

You'd think there'd be some kind of audio analog of that to fill the gap. Like something with simple avatars even; something which requires only a fraction of the resources as even low res, low frame rate video. People like chatting, it seems, and I think the reason for this is that it's passive and asynchronous. If little clips could be recorded easily and placed into a queue so your system is truly analogous to IM, meaning passive and asynchronous, then it could catch on.

With the exception that text has the advantage of silence, you might be on to something there. You could have a separate window for each conversation. To send a voice clip, hold a button while you talk, and be given a send, discard, or append option. Clips from those you're chatting with queue up and either automatically play when the window is in focus or there's a Play button.

Still, while that offers a potentially more natural means of communication, text still has the (in my opinion very large) advanta

Whether gaming or chatting on AIM (or even email), I refuse to converse with people who can't make an effort to speak properly. I read english. I don't read txt-msg. I should not have to read your sentences three or four times to figure out what you're saying, just because you're too lazy to write propertly. And hell, it's more difficult to write like that than it is to write properly. Takes more time, too.

It's not an elitist thing, either. It's just a matter of time and energy. I don't have any more time to sit and puzzle together someone's stupid "netspeak" comments than I have to figure out what the fuck something like "skeet" means.

Worse is when someone can't be bothered to type "you are" instead of "u r" - but they can be bothered to put 50 exclamation points in the same fucking sentence.

I guess you are not very fond of abstract art and cubism then... Seriously, if people do communicate this way, then there might be some benefit in it, even if you can't fathom it.

You must also realise that some people can read/write in such shortcuts very easily, and it's you who can be ridiculous not being able to quickly read the "garbled" message (especially in MMOGs, counter-strike and web-chats).

I almost never use webspeak/textspeak/leetspeak, but I do appreciate the beauty of it and I would have use

I work for a rather large technology company and about two years ago, Blackberries became quite popular amongst the managment gang. During a rather prolonged conference call discussing some technical "challenges", one of the previously mentioned management types joined the call. The question was then raised about client notification. The PHB then promptly responded "Yes they are aware, we have been Rimming each other all weekend".

...as long as people understand regular English (or their respective native language) first, and understand that as with all slang, there is a time and a place for it.

A lot of people in the "professional" work force don't seem to understand that professionalism is supposed to extend to their written communications, and things like "werd" and "brb" in an email to a higher level executive don't provide a professional image.

So many of us play World of Warcraft these days, needless to say, where your primary communication is through the chat window. In my guild we have members ranging from 16-40+. The only young ones who are able to stay in the guild succesfully are those who can write using "normal" english.

If they don't, we mock them, example:
young'en: can neone help me?
olde 'en: I don't know, "Neone" does not seem to be on right now.
young'en: what?
olde 'en: There is no player named "Neone" in our guild.
young'en: no, i mean i want ANYONE to help me!
olde 'en: oh! you should have said so in the first place.
(I make an alt named "Neone" )
Neone: I can help you! But I am only a level 1 druid...

'gf', 'wtf[h]', 'swak', 'asap'
Some of these are pretty old, probably adopted as netspeak, which should underscore that, like the
muck that is the english language, so is netspeak adaptable. What's worse is when k1dz put t3xt m3ss4g3 s14ng 1n th31r
p4p3rz. Teachers have seen quite a bit of it, as an article several months back in the San Jose Murky News told of. u for you,
mi for me, etc. English if nothing else has accumulated and occasionally discarded words from other languages and even
made acronyms words. It's an ongoing thing over generations. Quite a lot comes in from whatever the big social upheaval is at the time
a lot of slang came out of WW II with returning GI's

The problem is that spelling is often uncorrected. While this is fine for a casual conversation, spelling errors are unproffesional.
Of course this doesn't mean that some people will not put in the effort to spell correctly when it matters.

What bothers me is not the acronyms. It is the degradation of spelling and grammer that seems to be rampant on the net. It makes me cringe to see the way that some people communicate. Of course, the problem could have existed in pre-webforum times, and it is just more apparant now.

P.S. I am intentionally not spell checking this post, because if I mispelled something, it will help to proev my point.

I see it all the time in slashdot. Google returns about 945,000 hits for "grammer". I mean, seriously. I am not an English speaker, and I cannot understand where this error comes from. It's not like the 'a' and 'e' keys are next to each other. It's not a potentially confusing spelling like "it's" vs. "its", or "loose" vs. "lose". And for my foreign, non-English ear, the pronounciation of the 'a' and 'e' vowels are completely distinct.

And for my foreign, non-English ear, the pronounciation of the 'a' and 'e' vowels are completely distinct.

This is why is happens: phonetics. I myself often have trouble remembering which it should be because of this.

In American English, at least all the dialects I've personally heard, because the emphasis is on the first syllable, the second vowel is often neglected, and since the "a" is is pronounced as a nondescript "uh" in this context (as in both syllables of 'butter'), and the word comes off akin to "gram-rrr".

R is itself a semivowel, which can be pronounced alone without the use of any other vowels, though it isn't properly written that way. The closest vowel combination to a stand-alone "R" is "er", which is itself very close to the "ar" (with 'a' as 'uh', thus 'uhr') in "grammar", hence the easy confusion.

I once drew up a thing that you might find useful, deliniating the different vowel and dipthong sounds used in American English, arrayed in order by similarity, and the stupidly large assortment of different written letters that can make those sounds. This is from memory so it might be a bit off...

VOWEL SOUND- LETTER EXAMPLES

ee- "e" in "be", "i" in "sing", "y" in "very", "ea" in "eat", "ee" in "bee".

ih- "i" in "bit"

aa- "a" in "bat"

ah- "o" in "bot", "a" in "car", "augh" as in "caught", "ough" as in "ought", "aw" as in "law"

eh- "e" as in "bet"

uh- "u" as in "but", "a" as in "a thing".

oh- "o" as in "note", "ow" as in "throw", "oa" as in "oats", "eau" as in French

ouh-"oo" as in "book"

oo- "u" as in "dude", "o" as in "do", "oo" as in "pool", "ew" as in "new", "ough" as in "through", "w" as in "now" (as part of a dipthong)

And there are two dipthongs that sometimes get single-letter representations in English (the rest are just combinations of the above base sounds):

ee/oo dipthong- "u" as in "butane" (pronounced like "you" the second person pronoun)

ah/ee dipthong- "i" as in "kite" (pronounced like "I" the first person pronoun)

Seriously, English pronunciation is just fucked up in the namespace (amongst many other places). We need like twice as many written vowels as we've got to represent all the sounds.

As the other poster pointed out, it comes down to most people today learning their spelling from speech. Or so it seems.

My personal pet peeve, and I've only really noticed this in the past few years, has been the word "ridiculous". Seemingly overnight, half of the under-25 crowd on IRC started typing "rediculous". Drove me bonkers for months. Finally, I went on a very long and pompous tirade about spelling. I couldn't take it anymore.

Several of them then explained to me that that is how they think it's sp

If you can type worth a damn, then it really doesn't save you any time abbreviating everything; it just ends up making you look like a tool.
The only time I could consider using such abbreviations is when I'm typing a text message on a phone, or some keyboard that is so hopelessly small that it doesn't lend itself to touch-typing.

In thirty to forty years, when people can talk easily (or even use video), the netspeak culture will probably be much reduced, if not eliminated. We'll be viewed as antiquated folks, possibly like Beatniks or something, for being so nerdy as to type words all the time. I mean, you have to know how to use a keyboard for that! Ludicrous!

I like "netspeak". I don't use it much, but I like that a subculture exists, as computers have changed things so much that they very much deserve one. I also like that we've already seen a rapid turnaround: our current abbreviations are one variant, the 31337 stuff another, the variant where vowels are always lowercase and consants uppercase (or the other way around) is pretty much gone now, and the old school one from the DOS based BBSes where people used the extended ASCII set to do similar things has been extint for awhile.

Have you ever noticed how there's a lot more ambiguity trying to talk to someone over the phone than in person? Has anyone here ever gravely offended someone because of a misinterpreted IM?

face to face: Body language + tone of voice
Phone: only tone of voice, losing all the information that bodylanguage brings
IM: nothing.

The English language (others too) is at best an incomplete tool of communication. All the subtleties that tone of voice and body language convey are lost over internet chat. Why else would people use those asinine "smileys" to convey their mood? They do this because otherwise, it's rather difficult to get a feel of the other person's mood.

While I won't comment on the irony of this post coming from someone named "133t-somethingorother,"I agree with you completely. I'm kind of "older" for the IM crowd (early 30s), and in general, I find it absolutely infuriating. It's the most impoverished mode of communication i've ever experienced. All the absence of conversational pragmatics normally present in speech, and none of the well-formed ideas of writing. Email, while it may be half-duplex, at least has the advantage that a single message is int

We just need to be concerned if people can't tell when to use one form versus another. In school I was tought not to use "can't" (but to use "can not") in formal writing, but it is perfectly fine in casual writing. Language has many layers to its depth. The fact is "netspeak" fills a role where space is precious, or quick back and forth communication is desired such as in gaming.

I only worry about speech that is not clear or not precise. Netspeak is clear and precise, though you may have to learn it like

Of course there's nothing wrong with playing with acronyms and trying to increase the efficiency of communications. I'm sometimes wonder about these so-called short-cuts not really being shortcuts (many of them are a lot harder to type than the actual word), but I don't think the concern is slang destroying english.

Rather, it's the laziness involving a complete lack of punctuation and other more subtle elements of the language which convey the tone and perhaps intent that is worrisome. Combine that with self-correcting software like spell checkers, and essentially a person never really develops communications skills beyond a certain point. And then they carry themselves in text communications as idiots.

A friend applied for a job that he wasn't really interested in and received a form-letter rejection via email, riddled with grammatical errors, incorrect usage of some words (they're/their/there, then/than), and so on. He corrected the letter rather sarcastically and sent it back to them and they actually apologized AND offered him the job! Apparently people who can write english as well as speak it are in short supply.

Rather, it's the laziness involving a complete lack of punctuation and other more subtle elements of the language which convey the tone and perhaps intent that is worrisome. Combine that with self-correcting software like spell checkers, and essentially a person never really develops communications skills beyond a certain point. And then they carry themselves in text communications as idiots.
Indeed. It is not so much the use of Netspeak as it occurs on the Internet, but that it has a tendency to creep in

Unlike French, which is guarded by the French Academy, there is no "official", or "regular" English language. Instead, there are about 500 Million Plus individual languages, each varying in the number of common elements, which are all collectively called the "English Language".

Unless I have a bigger gun than you, your version of English is just as "correct" as mine.

Why am I filled with a nameless dread as I open this discussion? Why do I fear what I shall find?

I fear I shall see a plethora of posts, all alike in their incoherent use of obscure, incomprehensible acronyms and abbreviations, intelligible only to residents of the deepest rings of the Internet's darkest places.

I fear that, upon reading the content contained herein, I hall be inundated with the text chat of the Deep Old Ones.

Is English the ultimate 'pidigin' language? *shrug* It does seem to absorb everything.

English is built upon 30% French, 30% 'Latinate', 30% West German, and the rest is what was lying around the British Islands (Celtic, Galegic, etc.). All of these influences happened because Britan was invaded...a lot. It has touched many cultures and been everywhere. Grammar and spelling rules are more dictated by historical reasons than pheonetic. It is also heavily 'exported' all over the world due to world influence of Britian and now the US.

Is it bad that Instant Messenger programs and computers communciation in general is changing English? Not really. It just shows that English is very much a living language. Besides I consider it to be a transitive thing: people generate grammatic errors and chose different patters because of the keyboard input. Once technology evolves to something different for the primary Human-Machine interface then this will be less of an issue.

There's always the possiblity that you suck as a teacher. One thing that pissed me off in high school was bad teaching. If an entire class fails a math test, retakes it, and fails again, the problem is most likely not the stsudents. Either the test is poorly written or the teacher didn't do their job.

I'm not saying that you're neccesarily the problem, I'm just asking you to examine yourself first if it's a seemingly widespread problem.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.